Dido and Aeneas, alfresco in Rome
Over the holidays I watched one of the free Netflix
offerings, “The Little Hours,” which is an intermittently amusing
pseudo-medieval comedy loosely based in Boccaccio’s Decameron. It got me
thinking about the importance of horny nuns to the European literary tradition,
and the problems that tradition raises for the current search for the “authentic
female voice” in our early literatures.
Before you
had nuns you had widows, the most influential of whom was the Carthaginian queen,
Widow Dido. Though committed to the
memory and ashes of her murdered husband Sychaeus, she immediately feels a
hormonal stirring when Aeneas rides into town.
(He washes up on the beach, actually.)
In one of Virgil’s great lines Dido confesses to her sister Anna: Adgnosco veteri vestigia flammae (iv.
23) “I recognize the signs of the old flame.”
Here is the ancient origin of the still current phrase old flame; but note that in Virgil it
means not a particular old boyfriend but eroticism itself. But there is such a thing as spiritual
eroticism as well. Near the end of the Purgatorio the pilgrim Dante, sensing
the proximity of Beatrice, says to Virgil: Conosco
i segni dell’antica fiamma. Virgil
would surely have recognized one of his own greatest lines, but it is precisely
at this point (Purgatorio xxx, 48-49) that Virgil has disappeared from the poem
like a whiff of smoke. “Types and
shadows have their ending,” as the Pange
lingua puts it, “for the newer rite is here.”
Dante’s
“use” of Dido, which is enabled in part by the linguistic closeness of Latin to
his Florentine vernacular, is particularly brilliant; but any European who
could read knew Dido’s tragic history.
After indulging in a torrid sexual affair with her—which she called a
“marriage”—Aeneas dumped her and sailed away to do his boy thing (founding the
Roman Empire). Crazed by love, Dido
committed suicide. Thus she became
literature’s most famous abandoned woman—and abandoned in the double sense of
giving herself over completely to passion and of being scorned by a faithless
lover. This literary version of the
“abandoned woman” was given its classical expression in Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of the imaginary
letter exchanges between famous abandoned women and the jerks who shafted them. Prominent among them are the purported
letters of Dido. For a thousand years
pre-pubescent boys had Latin drills based in the erotic language of the fourth
book of the Æneid. Augustine writes about it. So there is a great deal of the “voicing” of
abandoned women, and all of it written by males, and all of it deriving
ultimately from the male schools of classical Antiquity.
Abelard and Heloise, from a MS of the Roman de la Rose
Fast-forward
to the first half of the twelfth century.
In general the social conditions of women have not changed dramatically
since Ovid’s day. It’s still a man’s
world. But Christianization has created
at least one very important innovation in this regard: the female religious
house. In the thousands of nunneries of
medieval Europe tens of thousands of women live by votive principle in
single-sex communities having as little commerce with men as is practically
possible. In these houses there are
often important functions, “leadership roles” of teaching and administration,
of financial management, of artisanal crafts that perforce have to be
undertaken by women. From this situation
arises a paradox. A form of life
seemingly designed to demand maximal denial of, and impose maximal constraints
upon its followers in fact enables many women to flourish in ways that would
never be open to them in the world beyond the cloister. This is particularly true, perhaps, in the
sphere of letters. Virginia Woolf
famously yearned for “a room of her own.”
In the Middle Ages it was fairly easy for a woman to get one, if it was
a cell. So we get a Hrotsvitha, the learned
tenth-century canoness of Gandersheim, and the author of erudite Latin dramas
on the model of those of Plautus and Terence.
In the twelfth century we get the polymath genius Hildegard of Bingen,
a Benedictine nun who was among other things a poet, a musician, a scientist,
and a speculative theologian.
This brings
us to one of the most celebrated literary episodes of the Middle Ages, and back
to horny nuns. I refer to the famous
dossier of “correspondence” between Abelard and Heloise. Concerning this famous dossier I am a
heretic, for I do not believe that Heloise’s letters are any more “real” than
Dido’s letters in the Heroides. This is a blog post, not a scholarly essay,
and I shall not argue the case. I freely
admit that my heresy, which has proved on more than one occasion to be
life-threatening when raised in the presence of feminist scholars, is a
distinctly minority view; but I have to call them like I see them. One of Heloise’s great lines to Abelard is
this: “Even if I could be Queen to the Emperor and have all the power and
riches in the world, I’d rather be your whore.”
That is one horny nun, and in its level of abandonment the “authentic
voice” sounds to me like that of Ovid.
Be that as
it may, the Abelard-Heloise correspondence had a huge fictional posterity. It is not going too far to see in it a
precursor of the epistolary novel, which became so prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries with writers like Richardson in Pamela
and Choderlos de Laclos in Les liaisons dangereuses. The horny nun also became a staple of the love
literature of those centuries. The most famous of a dozen examples is
probably the Portuguese Letters (Lettres portugaises traduites en français)
first published in Paris in 1669. The
purportedly “authentic voice” of the letters was that of a jilted Portuguese
nun named Mariana Alcoforado. The actual
author was a French libertine and Ovid-reader named Gabriel de Lavergne, sieur
de Guilleragues. Another male fantasy,
actually.
